Sounding off on expensive salmon

I don’t always have time to read the Sound Offs that are written in response to my stories. Today was an exception, though. We carried my piece speculating on whether this is the year we’ll see $40-a-pound salmon.

The story is keyed to the Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting near Seattle this week to impose what’s increasingly looking like will be a total ban on fishing for salmon off the California and Oregon coasts this spring and summer. That’s a response to a precipitous decline in the number of salmon headed back to the Sacramento River.

After reading the Sound Offs, I have a cupla things I think we should make clear:

Of course you can get salmon at Wal Mart for $6 a pound — frozen, and farmed. It’s Atlantic salmon. That’s just not the same thing as fresh, troll-caught wild chinook.

However, even frozen and farmed salmon does not taste the same as tofu. Properly prepared, tofu can taste pretty good — but it doesn’t taste like salmon.

And I’m glad someone pointed out that maybe the reason we got blackened and honey-glazed salmon, when the unvarnished filet is so good, is that a lot of people are eating the farmed stuff, which to many a palate can use some improvement.

I’m told by the Whole Foods up north of the U District that they’re selling their fresh Alaskan chinook for $32.99 a pound, not the $39.99 cited by a Sound Offer. Dunno what they’ve been charging prior to this, though.